James Sallis - Ghost of a Flea

“You going to be okay?”

I nodded. A nurse’s head tilted in around the door. Red hair, full lips. “Mr. Griffin?” Then she came on in. Eyes green and alive, forever in motion, unbecomingly wide hips somehow still sexy, tattoo of barbed wire on one upper arm. “Physical therapy called, asked me to let you know they’re on their way.” Her name tag hung from a lanyard of multicolored beads, swaying as she walked: Erin. “Need anything before? Pain meds, new designer gown, box lunch?”

“Still no word, I take it, on my pardon from the governor?”

Sad face. “Sorry.”

“Just as well. I absolve you all, you know.”

“Of course you do.”

When she was gone, Deborah came and lay beside me on the bed. My right hand cradled her stomach, my left embraced her. “We’ve had good times, Lew. Lots of them.” Her hair was streaked with gray, strands of it. When had those shown up? Memory was so unreliable, such a liar. So self-serving. Only thing it did well was break your heart.

Down in the street a lowrider passed with speakers blaring so loudly that it set off alarms in parked cars as it passed. We lay there listening to them go off, one after another, as it cruised along.

“It always escalates, Lew. You know that.”

“She didn’t want to bother me with it. Wanted to wait till I was out of the hospital at least, she said. I’m not sure she would have brought it up at all, if Larson hadn’t pushed.”

“So he’s concerned.”

“Larson’s the one who told me about it in the first place. Couldn’t have been easy for him, either. He and Alouette have a strong relationship, if not one we’d think of as ordinary. They have their own, quite independent lives. Distinct personalities. But they’re solidly together and respect one another’s opinions, beliefs, decisions. Seems to be plenty of space left in the relationship for that.”

“You’re saying he saw coming to you with this as a violation.”

I nodded.

Don stood, flexing back and shoulder muscles. He rolled his head forward and back, shoulder to shoulder. “Used to be I could sit for more than five minutes without everything stiffening up, you know?”

I knew.

“I don’t keep moving, body’s not the only thing’s gonna stiffen up,” Don went on. “So in past weeks there’ve been more of these messages.”

“More of them, and closer together.”

He glanced again at the one in his hand.

“Look, it’s not like there’s anything else I have to do, Lew. I can sit at home and spend my mornings worrying what’s for lunch, or I can get up off my butt and onto this. Still have favors I can call in. Forensics, for a start. I’ll have them take a look at this.” He held up the note. “And the file from her computer at work. You got any problem with my talking to Alouette, asking her about it?”

“Not if she doesn’t.”

We were silent then. I’ve been blessed with good friends.

“Where are you?” Don said finally.

“I was remembering the first time I saw you, slumped against a wall downtown with blood pooling under you and garlic on your breath.” The day he’d saved my life. “Then, later, how you showed up at my place with this yellow piece-of-shit BanLon shirt on. I mean, just how fucking white can you get?”

Don shrugged.

We’d been friends so long, been through so much together, that looking at him was a lot like looking in the mirror. And just as somewhere in your mind you stay twenty years old forever and are always slightly surprised when this old guy’s head pops up in there, I was never quite prepared to see my friend looking so tired and worn down.

“You miss him, Don?”

Something we’d rarely spoken of since it happened. We found him, half afloat, half submerged, in the bathtub, plastic bag secured about his head.

“Every day of my life. I just keep thinking, if only I’d had the chance to get to know him better. If I’d made the chance, found it somehow.”

“You did what you could.”

“I don’t know…. I know what he was, Lew. Like I told you then, it just doesn’t seem to make much difference.”

“He was right about one thing: Everything’s water if you look long enough.”

Don nodded. “From his note.”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter how much time you have. Maybe you’re still left with all these piles of unfinished business.”

Don sank back into his chair. “When did everything turn to past tense for us, Lew? You notice that happening?”

I shook my head.

He picked up the paper again. “You know what this is from?”

If I have now made up my mind to write it is only in order to reveal myself to my shadow, that shadow which at this moment is stretched across the wall in the attitude of one devouring with insatiable appetite each word I write. It is for his sake that I wish to make the attempt. Who knows? We may perhaps come to know each other better.

“A Persian novel, The Blind Owl .”

“Which of course you’d read.”

“Not a clue. But it took Rick about two minutes flat to track it down on the Internet.”

“And what is this? Drawn on?”

“Looks like someone did it on a computer, ran the typeface up to the point of blurring when he printed it out on an old dot matrix printer-not a well-maintained one, at that-then photocopied the printout. That’s Rick’s guess, anyhow.”

“Why go to all that trouble?”

I shrugged. “Why send it in the first place? Maybe he thought he was covering his tracks somehow, maybe he sent copies to world leaders, stuck them under windshield wipers at the nearest mall. Who the hell knows? We think he may have been trying to make it look like an engraving.”

“Okay. There’s anything here useful, the lab’ll find it.” He held the paper up close. “That flytrack at the bottom some kind of signature?”

“I’m pretty sure it says William Blake.”

“Tiger, tiger guy?”

I nodded. “Poetry was kind of a sideline for him, though. By trade he was an engraver. In his spare time he talked to angels.”

Home I went, then, in due time, limping and scuttling. There on my island, I sat watching lives go on. Rain had come on like the fury it was, slamming away at houses and cars, lifting lawn appliances to abandon them half a block down and two across, slapping pedestrians to the ground. And everywhere the cold, attacking as much from within as without.

Between two roaring worlds where they swirl, I.

Yes, Mr. Joyce.

Meanwhile, the good ship Rick Garces came calling at my island. Never a lack of friends or good food when Rick’s involved. This time, it was simple fare: polenta with wild mushroom sauce. Then he compensated with a salad of endive, baby green spinach, a handful of what looked like purple weeds, and slivers and bits of jicama, sweet cactus, sour German pickle. The mix of people, predictably, was as offbeat as the salad.

A couple of gay activists from NO AIDS arrived first, a longtime pair oddly enough, given that one (in vintage Capri pants and chambray shirt) was male, the other (wearing Fifties sharkskin suit and saddleback shoes) female. All night long they stood side by side, a preponderance of sentences beginning “Eddie [or, conversely, Edie] and I …”

Next came a lawyer “down from Tulane, way down,” working as he did exclusively pro bono cases. He sported the uniform of old New Orleans money, gray-and-white seersucker suit, starched shirt, bow tie. Luckily, he said, he’d been relieved of the burden of making a living and so was able to practice a purer form of law. And what better use (smiling) to which to put his family’s ill-got money?